Mr O’Brien. Oh, good.
She is leaning over, rolling her wet hair in a towel.
He must have walked, blind, through the drifts to the front door.
8 I meet Alex Fleming for dim sum. I havent seen her since New Year’s. She wants help with an art project that deals with passion. She says, Did I reach between your legs with a broom? Did I?
She reaches into her purse. I dont picture you as a man who is quiet, she says. Who doesnt talk much.
Alex has thin skin on a strongly defined face, long bleached hair, twenty-six. She has big eyes. Her eyes, I imagine, will get bigger. The eyes are slightly crazy. Or, she has come through craziness.
We are paying the bill. I notice she has a passport in her purse. You were born in seventy-three, I say.
I am trying to be a customs agent, or prescient. I am formal but flirting. Alex Fleming pulls out the passport, numerous ports of entry. I see her photo and birthdate. Her full name:
Marie Alexandra Fleming.
I was born in October, Officer.
She says officer in a tone that is courageously sexual. This tone lingers for a moment. I am supposed to be a border guard considering her credentials. Then the word and its tone disappear. Flirting is such a delicious act. I show her a photo of Lydia when she was five.
Alex: Youre a sentimental guy.
Her knuckle touches my hand. She has sophisticated fingers, the slight cool of a silver ring. Alex is not asking about the photo if she asked I’d say it reminds me that Lydia is crazy, mad, sexy, brilliant, funny. And that being with her, I lack regret. But that would bore the hell out of flirtation.
Dim sum means small heart, Alex says, or appetizers.
She turns her cup over and twists it clockwise three times.
I lift her cup and read her fortune.
I see a beach, and bright skies. There is a window with louvres. A man is bringing you something.
Alex: Is the man good to me?
Me: He has tender hands.
You love the word louvres, dont you?
I confess I am a lover of louvres.
Alex: Did you know there are no muscles in the fingers?
We examine each other’s fingers. It’s an excuse to touch. Then she reads my cup. It involves two quiet sailboats. Meeting at a boom.
Alex: It is meeting someone else. Briefly.
Me: Do they have an affair?
An affair of the heart, she says. And there’s a successful career too, a well-earned one.
Pluck rather than luck, I say.
Alex: Although youre very lucky.
Outside a fat snow falling.
And this too seems shocking.
I can smell cologne.
Alex Fleming is a woman who wears cologne.
There is a figure riding a bicycle, leaning hard over the handlebars, and I recognize the bicycle. It’s Lydia.
Lydia: Oh hi!
Alex opens a lavender umbrella to the snow and three nude women pop out, dancing across its ribs. And I cannot see Lydia for the umbrella.
9 Me: She wants me to write some prose poems on passion.